Real-time global illumination computation status and further research prospects

Abstract

Currently, computer graphics is a very important part of computer science. Graphics-related developments have been used in many different situations, for example, in animated and cinema movie productions, in computer graphics applications, modeling, and simulation systems, for different visualizations in medicine, mathematics, physics, etc. One of the main problems of computer graphics is the task of transforming the information of some imaginary scene and its observer into a photorealistic image of this scene for them. Solving this problem is very important, but right now obtaining a good quality result is possible only in a non-interactive scenario (for example, in animated films), while in real-time (for example, in computer modeling or simulations, in computer games) it is usually necessary to use some approximate algorithms. Although these algorithms are often able to provide a natural-looking result, they still have plenty of very noticeable inaccuracies. However, this topic is gaining more and more development recently due to the improvement of graphics processors. In addition to a significant increase in computation speed and the number of cores, the appearance of ray tracing hardware acceleration plays a large role. Global illumination computation is an inseparable part of photorealistic image generation. This paper is focused on solving this problem in real-time, which means developing a system capable of generating such images at a speed sufficient for the resulting sequence to be perceived by a person as a smooth animation. We give the theoretical information required for understanding this problem and describe existing methods and algorithms for solving it with their advantages and disadvantages. Also based on an overview of the topic's current state, we analyze further research prospects and directions for improving existing and developing new methods of real-time global illumination calculation, while considering compute power and technologies of the latest graphics hardware.